FIND A GRAVE CHANGES POLICY TO BE MORE SENSITIVE : OPINION BY ANCESTRY WORSHIP GENEALOGY

FIND A GRAVE, the web site that features volunteers and others posting private information on where a human has been buried, has changed its policy, giving some credence to the sensitivity of living family.  It is not enough.  They have determined that they will allow family to grieve for three months before posting the location of the burial. (FIND A GRAVE WILL GIVE YOU A CHANCE TO OBJECT, if you register with them, then they will hold off for a YEAR.)

The lack of privacy in death that the deceased person and their loved ones has makes me feel some outrage at the whole situation - costly burials and the whole lousy funeral industry included. 

Apparently if you are living in the United States, you have about 70 years of privacy when it comes to census records, but almost none in death, and since most people who are alive have family who have died THIS ERODES THEIR PRIVACY TOO.  It is no wonder that fraudsters, including people who call up old widows and try to get their money, operate so easily. They see an obit, do a little research, and soon they have the person's address and phone number thanks to some of the most popular genealogy databases.  It's shameful.

I know someone whose parents were robbed of their life savings by such a fraudster and he knew all sorts of things about them and their children, which the criminal used in his story.  

Someone else I knew, who was in very deep grief over the death of his wife, was solicited by some lonely widows!  (To his credit he joked that he could not move to Florida because there would be even more of them after him there!  He had no interest in dating or remarrying.)

I had this experience years ago when a loved one died after a long, horrible illness. I was still in grief when I found out that the expensively paid for funeral and grave site - supposed to be on HOLY GROUND in a RELIGION-BOUND CEMETERY YET, was posted on FIND A GRAVE.  I recall seeing this on the Internet and a sick feeling spread through my stomach.

Apparently, the whole cemetery had been tramped on as a couple went around taking down information about the tombstones but when? I called the cemetery and tried to express my displeasure and got a snotty person on the phone who did not give a damn. She sure wasn't going to contact these people for me.

This person, who I was calling long distance, previously also did not want to reveal to me where my very own ancestors were buried in the cemetery - apparently it would take a visit to find out. Since then I have to wonder how many cemetery workers just think "go look at the FIND A GRAVE web site!" Since then others have died and been buried in that cemetery and the same thing - the information is exposed to the world! 

It was at that time that I decided if I myself was buried I would NEVER WANT A TOMBSTONE. (We really need to rethink why we need to have a tombstone at all. I don't think too many people actually visit cemeteries and the whole kneeling on the grave, looking at the tombstone and saying prayers thing, which I've witnessed others doing, is something I will not do. That person is gone. The best embalming and the heaviest locked up casket will not stop a body from decaying, be it in the ground or above ground.)  

Though the couple who did this outrageous privacy invading reportage did post that if you objected you could contact them and they would take the information down, I had to wonder how many people even knew what they had done and who they were! Latter Day Saints in a Catholic cemetery?  People who were with the local historical society?  Did they have any family buried in the cemetery?  What about the cemetery management and the church that claims this is Holy Ground - a great place for co-religionists to wait it out until The Second Coming resurrects them?  Maybe Jesus has his own database?

The idea that someone will offend you first, and then if you object, they will backtrack on the Internet yet, which is after all is world-wide, is sort of like when some man you're out on a first date with grabs your breast (or worse) and only if you object will he remove it. In other words, FIND A GRAVE and their cohorts seem to be, like some social networks with empire building agendas, speculatively depend on being caught and you making a fuss rather that ASKING YOUR PERMISSION IN THE FIRST PLACE. That is simply NOT DECENT.  

Further, FIND A GRAVE has turned into a place where people are posting private genealogy information as well: this is something I NEVER do as a professional. It is one thing to find out someone who died in 1906 in Austria is buried at a certain place, another to find out your mother's grave has been revealed. 

Privacy Rules for the Deceased and Their Families should be the same across the board.  Leave the dead to rest in peace and their loved ones alone too! 

There are many other privacy deprivations in place in the world of genealogy including in databases, and you can be sure FIND A GRAVE INFORMATION IS SHOWING UP ON ANCESTRY (The genealogy database: This blog has no relationship with it.) and well, lots of other places, including FAMILY SEARCH. 

I do wonder if FIND A GRAVE just decided to foist all that free, volunteer-given work over to ANCESTRY or if ANCESTRY PAID THEM?  FAMILYSEARCH? There is nothing wrong with contributing your free time and knowledge to a database but they need to be held accountable for privacy invasion. I await the day when someone who has been a victim of crime can point to these sites as to how the criminal found them and hold them accountable.)

Can cemetery sites help you with genealogy?  Certainly.  But let's get PRIVACY LAWS IN PLACE to show respect. Let the person rest in their grave without the world knowing where to locate them until decades have passed.

C 2022 Ancestry Worship - Genealogy.

(By the way, you are under no obligation to publish an obituary, and the funeral businesses putting obits and a plea for commentary and soliciting people to buy flowers and so on the internet, can also be insensitive. If someone has died and you have been informed, the thing to do is make a personal contact with the loved ones, not post on the Internet. If they are not personal enough to you to have been notified, you're just minding other people's business. This solicitation of posting remarks on Internet obits has become a sort of pressured activity, and funeral businesses are behind it.  If you want your privacy in death, be sure that your contract with the funeral home and cemetery include a contract in which they will not post and will not allow your burial site to be revealed!)

 

I BUST THROUGH A PERSONAL GENEALOGY MYSTERY - EUPHORIA!

EUPHORIA!

On the tail of my last post about genealogy screw ups, let me tell you that on Sunday December 12th, 2021, around noon, I had a long awaited and hunted breakthrough in my own personal genealogy.  In fact, I'm writing this post a couple hours later, while the elation I feel is at a high, for future posting.  OK, I'm congratulating myself on my endurance and patience as well as my know-how. I'm thinking this post will be a positive start for the new year, 2022 and maybe it will inspire you.

During Covid shutdowns I did a lot of personal research using archives in other countries and saw documents that HAVE NOT BEEN SOLD OR SHARED to any of the "big" database companies that so many have come to depend on too much.  I think these countries are right to keep possession of their archival documents and I want to honor their volunteers as well (although I caution you that some of them are not reading correctly and posting widow's married name rather than their maiden names on remarriages, which should be corrected.)

One of these countries is Poland though this line of my ancestors lived in Galicia which was Austria at the time. 

The cell phone I downloaded on became defunct since then but on it I had downloaded dozens of pages "of interest" because what I wanted and needed and looked all over for - page by page in some cases - hundreds of pages - was not coming up. I eliminated the possibilities of finding birth records and a marriage record where they "should" have been - and read a wide range of villages which appear to have their own churches as part of a larger parish system. Then I got busy and failed to review what I had downloaded in the spring and summer of 2021. Until the evening of December 11th and the morning of December 12th - the first day of Christmas.

If I had not, on a trip over 20 years ago, gone to see a relative and asked her a couple questions about my ancestor's maiden name and heritage - which she strained to remember. If my great grandmother had not reported a dream  - a visitation - she had to this same relative (a few months before she died) which caused her to reveal that she had an older half brother and that they shared a mother - I might not have realized what I was looking at.

What if my great-grandmother had not had the dream? 

What if she had not told my relative?  

What if I had not asked my relative while she was still alive?

So here is the story.  

My great-grandmother was an "orphan." Her children never met an aunt or uncle. When I asked my relative what had happened to great-grandma's parents, she said her mother reported that one of them was "killed on the road" and the other "burned up in a fire." She was repeating what my great-grandmother had told her in Polish, trying not to elaborate.  

From that day on, I was trying to find out what town fire - or maybe it was the home hearth - might have burned up my great grandmother's mother. I thought it made sense that the mother would burn up and the father would be killed on the road but I still do not know. I imaged my great grandfather as a merchant traveling through the Carpathian mountains into Hungary, perhaps being surprised by highway robbers who wanted his silver... I look forward to finding death records of these ancestors which might have some notes.

My mother (and her sibling) seemed not to know anything much about their own grandparents, whom they never met. They seemed satisfied with moving forward into their own lives as if no one else had ever made this possible. In fact my grandmother had told them not to look back.

I once rejected renting a wood house because when I got inside it, as the wind blew and it creaked, I thought, "This place is a fire hazard!  I once rejected living in a certain apartment because the big window looked over the roof and I thought "If there is a fire, how can one escape across a hot asphalted roof?"  Not that I think I was once the woman who burned up in another life, but knowing I had such an ancestor in my lineage scared me. I would not want to live in an all wood house.

The not knowing who your people were is not so unusual actually.  It's one of the things that has propelled so many to do genealogy in the first place, to solve mysteries and set the record straight.

My great-grandparent's immigration documents and naturalization documents repeated the names of a few locations. I looked at maps going way back, the districting of parishes. I was sure that my great-grandmother's wedding - that of an orphaned girl who was match-made by friends - had been the creation of a caring priest, because who might attend?

So of course I immediately went to those mentioned places, those records and documents, and around them, on guard for genealogy myopia, looking at the correct dates or a few days, months, or years either way, and NOTHING!  Would it be my luck, my fate, that the very pages I needed were somehow missing? I'm terrific at figuring out bad handwriting and misspellings - that was not it. Or had these people been too far up in the mountains to come down and have an actual baptism in a church?  (On some records the midwife is named as the person who baptised.)

In genealogy deductive reasoning is good so long as you detail your path.

On my immigration posts full of advice last year I mentioned you should GO TO THE ADDRESS THEY GAVE ON THE SHIP and see who is living there.  I did this years ago, using microfilm and now old fashioned methods of finding an enumeration district per census year.

To my amazement I found the half brother (or someone with his very same name) and two other men there with the same surname as my grandmother. However, these names were fairly common in the area they mentioned coming from. I concluded that my great-grandfather might simply have headed for a boarding house where other men he knew in the Old Country headed but I hoped they could be related or intermarried somehow.  

As the records did not show up where they "should've" been, as volunteers in Poland continued to give of their time to create databases that did not yet have death records, I relied on marriages and births and I began to go page to page, reasoning that if these people had siblings, then probably siblings would show up somehow.  I ran into common names and dozens of candidates.

Using the information on the census of 1910 at the address in the United States my great-grandfather had headed, I took down the names, ages, and marital status of other men living there.  *** He was no longer there - having already moved to another city for work.

As it turned out this is the very thing that made all the difference.

I looked for all documents taken at the location in Poland where my great-grandmother listed herself as having been living with a "sister" before coming to America.  It turns out that someone from that very town actually ran a boarding house in the same area that my great-grandfather had gone to. My great-grandmother lived there while he took a train into another city for work!

Using all those saved documents held in Polish archives on the cell phone, I read one after another again, taking notes by hand. I FOUND THAT THE HALF BROTHER and one of the other men at that boarding house with my great-grandmother's maiden name as a surname DID INDEED HAVE THE SAME MOTHER. Using their marriage records rather than my great-grandmother's missing record, I determined her mother's maiden name.  These men's marriage records give their ages and also mention that the parents are deceased. They were the men at that boarding house in 1910 - the census ages and their ages on birth records match. Therefore, I learned they too were orphans at the time of their marriages and I now have the names of my great-grandmother's birth parents and my great great-grandparents on that line.

Additionally, by reading around and around records for the big parish church mentioned verbally as the place of their marriage - which has not been found - I have learned that my great-grandfather's surname was quite rare in that location, but there is ONE marriage of a person with that name and he is listed as in the military at his marriage. As a military man he probably wasn't living where he was born or his family lived. There is also a mention of a child being born who would be about two years older than my great-grandfather that has a mention of a village nearby - the village he listed as his birth place.  It may be a little soon to conclude on this line as well, but I have a sense that I may have found my great-grandfather's line.

In the many years prior to these databases being uploaded by volunteers in Poland, I could have written to archives in Poland and paid genealogists there, and if I'd had the money, I probably would have.  Although the archivist would be more familiar with the records, they would have looked at the records I'm looking at myself... gone to the dates and places given... found nothing... sent me a bill or asked me if I wanted to spend more...

THERE IS ALWAYS THE POSSIBILITY MORE WILL BE FOUND THERE and that some things will only be available by special requests.  However, I now have so much more information to provide when I write.

By reading these records I noted that in towns where the Greek Catholic church prevailed, Roman Catholic children are recorded in the "big parish" nearest with a note of their village.  I have tripped over two curious listings that are not related to my family.  In one it is noted that a child has been born illegitimately - the woman is a convert and her Jewish father's name is listed.  In another, it is noted that a Jewish father, who did not marry another woman whose child is illegitimate, did show up for the baptism and want his name recorded. In these cases there is a strong story about changing times - Fiddler on the Roof times - in which there was forbidden love and lust.

A dozen lemon menthol cough drops later...  still overjoyed!

C 2022 Ancestry Worship Genealogy BlogSpot

All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights

A HISTORY OF LABOR LAWS FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA

LABOR CENTER : UNIVERSITY OF IOWA 

Follow the time line of changes up to 1938 as regional changes occurred addressing unfair labor practices.

*****

Listening to the radio in the wee hours of the mornings recently I learned that Los Angeles has a backlog of 50,000 evictions, that the city of West Hollywood recently upped the minimum wage to be paid there to $17 an hour, and that half of all American households cannot afford to buy or run a used car...

We Are Living Through History.  Be sure to write your memoirs!

DID YOUR ANCESTOR WORK AS A CHILD LABORER?

DAILY MAIL - GRIM PHOTOS - CHILD LABOR - by Chris Dyer 

Child labor was a reality for many an immigrant family. It was work or starve.  Even children worked up to ten hours a day on farms and in mines and factories.  And so America was not just built on adult labor but robbed children of what we call childhood now.  How fortunate those children whose parents could support them so that they could go to school!

EXCERPTS: Children at work in a Florida warehouse while smoking cigars. Many children smoked as they rolled cigars in factories across America.  In 1910 children under the age of 15 made up 18.4 percent of the nation's workforce....

Vance, who is 15 years old, was forced to sit in the darkness for ten hours a day for just 75 cents in a West Virginia coal mine. Many children were forced to work in these squalid conditions and it was not until 1938 that laws against child labor were passed by Congress.

AN ANCESTRY FAMILY TREE BASED ON RUMOR THROUGH A RELATIVE'S RESEARCH WAY OFF

A distant relative that I made contact with a couple years ago told me the family story which I soon learned was full of rumor, gossip, and error.  She also said she didn't give a hoot about genealogy.

Sometimes stories can be proofed or can lead us to the correct information.  However, in this case I really wondered who might have had an agenda to defame someone.

After I explained that genealogy is not the same as family stories, though the two can unite, I told her one of her stories was just plain wrong.

Then I offered to find some documents for her.

I went into the Ancestry TM genealogy database where I almost never look at the family tree function.  I forgot to uncheck it and upon putting her mother's married name in, up came a family tree.  She had not put it up there, but who had?   I printed it out.  None of it had an attached document.  No death certificates.  No marriage certificates.  

I decided to use the locations stated on this family tree posting to search census for the surname - nothing.  Most bizarre was that her very own mother was reported to have been buried in Canada.  I know where her mother is buried and it's not Canada.  It turns out that someone had decided that a person with the same surname but her mothers given and middle name reversed was her mother.  What a mess.  

That mess should not be called genealogy.

I realized that someone might have basically put all this information up with best wishes or hope someone else would straighten it all out.

This is just one more example of errors which are all over databases and all over the internet that other people rely on as fact.

Even if you are a hobbyist, hold yourself to professional standards.  DO NOT ADD TO THE MISINFORMATION BY POSTING what is NOT DOCUMENTED on any database for other people to see or use or rely upon!  And do not believe any "genealogy" that does not share proof documents.

We already have enough rumor, gossip, and error.

C 2021  Ancestry Worship - Genealogy BlogSpot

BONNE ANNEE

 

 

Ancestry Worship - Genealogy